Core i7-980X a long, hard look is that it’s a beast in the applications truly able to lean on its scaled-up architecture—and there are many. It leverages technologies first introduced on the Bloomfield generation of Core i7-900-series chips, like Turbo Boost and Hyper-Threading. But a recent shift to 32nm manufacturing results in transistors with decreased oxide thickness, reduced gate length, and, ultimately, less leakage current.

Consequently, Intel was able to increase complexity without pushing its design over the 130W TDP established by Bloomfield, giving us a six-core CPU featuring 12MB of shared L3 cache and capable of dropping into the same LGA 1366 interface you already know. The real question is whether the Core i7-980X is as Extreme as its price.

 The Core i7-980X gets us performance-freaks back to where we want to be—on-die memory controller, PCI Express handled by the well-endowed X58 chipset, and discrete graphics only